“I’ve heard of him,” said Montague.
“Well, I was with a show here on Broadway the next winter; and every night for six months he sent me a bunch of orchids that couldn’t have cost less than seventy-five dollars! And he told me he’d open accounts for me in all the stores I chose, if I’d spend the next summer in Europe with him. He said I could take my mother or my sister with me—and I was so green in those days, I thought that must mean he didn’t intend anything wrong!”
Toodles smiled at the memory. “Did you go?” asked the man.
“No,” she answered. “I stayed here with a roof-garden show that failed. And I went to my old manager for a job, and he said to me, ‘I can only pay you ten a week. But why are you so foolish?’ ‘How do you mean?’ I asked; and he answered, ‘Why don’t you get a rich sweetheart? Then I could pay you sixty.’ That’s what a girl hears on the stage!”
“I don’t understand,” said Montague, perplexed. “Did he mean he could get money out of the man?”
“Not directly,” said Toodles; “but tickets—and advertising. Why, men will hire front-row seats for a whole season, if they’re interested in a girl in the show. And they’ll take all their friends to see her, and she’ll be talked about—she’ll be somebody, instead of just nobody, as I was.”
“Then it actually helps her on the stage!” said Montague.
“Helps her!” exclaimed Toodles. “My God! I’ve known a girl who’d been abroad with a tip-top swell—and had the gowns and the jewels to prove it—to come home and get into the front row of a chorus at a hundred dollars a week.”
Toodles was cheerful and all unaware; and that only made the tragedy of it all one shade more black to Montague. He sat lost in sombre reverie, forgetting his companions, and the blare and glare of the place.
In the centre of this dining-room was a great cone-shaped stand, containing a display of food; and as they strolled out, Montague stopped to look at it. There were platters garnished with flowers and herbs, and containing roast turkeys and baked hams, jellied meats and game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes—every kind of food-fantasticality imaginable. One might have spent an hour in studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple, nothing natural. The turkeys had paper curls and rosettes stuck over them; the hams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs with a yellow mayonnaise-and all painted over in pink and green and black with landscapes and marine views—with “ships and shoes and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.” The jellied meats and the puddings were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works of art in pink and white confectionery—a barn-yard, for instance, with horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid—and one or two alligators.
And all this was changed every day! Each morning you might see a procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply. Montague remembered Betty Wyman’s remark at their first interview, apropos of the whipped cream made into little curleques; how his brother had said, “If Allan were here, he’d be thinking about the man who fixed that cream, and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading ‘The Simple Life’!”
He thought of that now; he stood here and gazed, and wondered about all the slaves of the lamp who served in this huge temple of luxury. He looked at the waiters—pale, hollow-chested, harried-looking men: he imagined the hordes of servants of yet lower kinds, who never emerged into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces, and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of sensuality—how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent them here!
From this as a starting-point his thought went on, to the hordes of toilers in every part of the world, whose fate it was to create the things which these blind revellers destroyed; the women and children in countless mills and sweatshops, who spun the cloth, and cut and sewed it; the girls who made the artificial flowers, who rolled the cigarettes, who gathered the grapes from the vines; the miners who dug the coal and the precious metals out of the earth; the men who watched in ten thousand signal-towers and engines, who fought the elements from the decks of ten thousand ships—to bring all these things here to be destroyed. Step by step, as the flood of extravagance rose, and the energies of the men were turned to the creation of futility and corruption—so, step by step, increased the misery and degradation of all these slaves of Mammon. And who could imagine what they would think about it—if ever they came to think?
And then, in a sudden flash, there came back to Montague that speech he had heard upon the street-corner, the first evening he had been in New York! He could hear again the pounding of the elevated trains, and the shrill voice of the orator; he could see his haggard and hungry face, and the dense crowd gazing up at him. And there came to him the words of Major Thorne:
“It means another civil war!”
CHAPTER XXI
Alice had been gone for a couple of weeks, and the day was drawing near when the Hasbrook case came up for trial. The Saturday before that being the date of the Mi-carême dance of the Long Island Hunt Club, Siegfried Harvey was to have a house-party for the week-end, and Montague accepted his invitation. He had been working hard, putting the finishing touches to his brief, and he thought that a rest would be good for him.
He and his brother went down upon Friday afternoon, and the first person he met was Betty Wyman, whom he had not seen for quite a while. Betty had much to say, and said it. As Montague had not been seen with Mrs. Winnie since the episode in her house, people had begun to notice the break, and there was no end of gossip; and Mistress Betty wanted to know all about it, and how things stood between them.
But he would not tell her, and so she saucily refused to tell him what she had heard. All the while they talked she was eyeing him quizzically, and it was evident that she took the worst for granted; also that he had become a much more interesting person to her because of it. Montague had the strangest sensations when he was talking with Betty Wyman; she was delicious and appealing, almost irresistible; and yet her views of life were so old! “I told you you wouldn’t do for a tame cat!” she said to him.
Then she went on to talk to him about his case, and to tease him about the disturbance he had made.
“You know,” she said, “Ollie and I were in terror—we thought that grandfather would be furious, and that we’d be ruined. But somehow, it didn’t work out that way. Don’t you say anything about it, but I’ve had a sort of a fancy that he must be on your side of the fence.”
“I’d be glad to know it,” said Montague, with a laugh—“I’ve been trying for a long time to find out who is on my side of the fence.”
“He was talking about it the other day,” said Betty, “and I heard him tell a man that he’d read your argument, and thought it was good.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Montague.
“So was I,” replied she. “And I said to him afterward, ‘I suppose you don’t know that Allan Montague is my Ollie’s brother.’ And he did you the honour to say that he hadn’t supposed any member of Ollie’s family could have as much sense!”